• Negotiate with leagues, book fights, and guide your fighters up the ranks to win titles.

• Manage your fighters’ careers, keep them happy but remember you can always get rid of them.

• Corner fighters and influence key moments in the fight.

• Deal with issues like missing weight, injuries, and PEDs.

• Upgrade and equip your gym with the best equipment to compliment your coaches.

• Fully simulated fighters and leagues that compete against each other as well as your fighters.

History

The two of us that make up Bit By Bit Games have been MMA fans for over a decade. We spend a lot of time watching it, reading about it, and discussing it. There have been many MMA, usually UFC, fighting games over the years but very few management games and none on mobile at the time. The few MMA management games that were out there tended to be about running a fight promotion, but we wanted to run a fight team and so MMA Manager was born.

Development started on MMA Manager in February 2015 with the goal of making a deep simulation/management game presented in a streamlined package for mobile.

One of the biggest challenges was deciding what we should fully simulate and what we should streamline. For example, the fight simulation is very deep and allows for thousands, if not millions, of potential combinations of actions that make up each fight. On the other hand we simplified fighter sponsorship to a fighter only having a single sponsor instead of many. We simulate a world of fight promotions, each had a roster of fighters and put on an event every month, we simulate all these fights, their fighters age and retire.

We had to find ways to abstract a fighter’s abilities into something manageable and understandable both for the simulation and for people playing it. For example do we need a boxing stat and a kickboxing stat and a karate stat? We decided we didn’t, what we needed was a striking stat and then we layer the styles on top of that.

So our fighters have an offensive & defensive stat for striking, grappling, and wrestling. In addition to the stats they have skills, which specify what particular style(s) they are trained in. Fighters come with these styles, most mma fighters are lifelong martial artists, and can also be learned from coaches.

Another challenge was what do we do about the real world issues that plague the sport like fighters missing weight or use performance enhancing drugs. We decided we wanted both of these issues in the game, these are an unfortunate part of the sport and shouldn’t be hidden. The issues come up as dilemmas they player has to deal with. A player cannot, for example, chose to give a fighter PEDs but there is a dilemma where a fighter’s PED use is brought the player’s attention. The player has to decide how they will deal with it, they can ignore it but if they fighter is caught using PEDs they will be banned.

We think we’ve achieved our goal of making MMA Manager a deep simulation/management game presented in a streamlined way. We have lots of concepts for additional content and features we plan to add in future updates and are excited to hear what players would like to see added to the game.

Features

An open-ended game in a simulated MMA world with 10 different fight promotions and at least 940 AI fighters.

Selected Articles

"MMA Manager is a great management sim to pass time or any train journey or whenever you get a spare moment. It is deep enough to allow you to feel like you are running things without ever being too overwhelming and will keep you entertained for many an hour. A must for any MMA fan." - Michael Dalgleish, ZERO1GAMING

"And in the end, to put a fine point on the cruelty of the life you’ve chosen, every one of your fighters will eventually age out of the sport and you’ll have to be the one to break it to them when they do. As the Episcopalians say, in the midst of life we are in death. Which means, manager, putting aside sentiment, throwing your delusions away, and getting on with the demise of the last generation and the recruitment of the next." - Josh Rosenblatt, Vice's FightLand

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